Obsessed with digital culture: writing on film, TV, music, and the internet

Author: Benjamin Brandall

Does the use of ‘z’ as a plural mark something out as being shit? Boyz II Men certainly had me thinking so. But, through snippets and half-memories, I’d gathered that Antz had the kind of political undertones that set it aside from your run-of-the-mill ’90s kids film that plays fast and loose with plurals.

Even though I’d seen the film’s “another ant film” counterpart, A Bug’s Life, as a child, I wasn’t prepared for how much graver and sincere Antz would be. To say that it has political undertones would be a childish reading: The film’s opener contains a sign that reads “Free Time Is For Training”; not the first jab at dehumanization in the industrial age, and certainly not the last.…
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This article is a re-formatted extract from Issue #1: Birth, which you can read more about here.

As Microsoft throws Paint into the digital wasteland with the rest of the internet’s abandonware, it’s hard not to get nostalgic about the simple graphical editor that influenced the “shit is good” aesthetic of the early 2000s internet. Its influence on internet culture is huge, with obvious examples being rage comics, stoner comics, and any image macro with awkwardly superimposed text and graphics.

Digital art that looked like shit started out as a necessity, yet slowly became a preference. Even today’s memes hark back to the days where the best material was thrown together on Paint in a matter of minutes.…
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The architecture of a social network doesn’t just affect a bunch of invisible server-whirrings and documentation jargon. It’s directly responsible for how the network’s users interact — what they’re allowed to say, what they’re likely to see, and who controls these factors.

A good example to start my examination into centralized/decentralized social networks is Twitter.

The name “Twitter” and the platform’s relentless bird imagery isn’t an arbitrary choice — it actually makes a lot of sense with regard to how the network works.

Starlings, for example, flock in groups of 10,000 or more, unified and communicating as a network. Birds learn to sing by listening and imitating, which often means that groups of co-existing birds learn the same patterns, inflections, and memes.…
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This article ties in to a podcast we recorded with the Archain team, available here.

Unreliable permanent storage is a problem that most people don’t know exists, but will have likely experienced first hand.

Under my desk, I store my fine collection of bricked laptops with the hope that one day I might salvage them for parts — on the hard drives of those long-dead machines, there are hundreds of gigabytes of lost data. Old music project files, documents, and other things I should’ve been smart enough to back up online.

The conditions that enable and encourage trolling aren’t exclusive to the internet, but they are more prevalent online than off, mostly thanks to the ease of anonymity and effects of crowd psychology. Territorial behavior — based either on platform loyalty or tight-knit communities — is amplified when geographical constraints no longer play a part. Internet crusades targeting other groups or individuals have become so commonplace that major platforms like Twitter have had to rethink their stance on free speech.

The internet population is growing, but it’s also fragmenting as real world issues polarize mainstream and fringe subcultures alike. In this article, I’ll examine the phenomena of internet territorialism and those who coordinate trolling on a large scale.…
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In my piece on neural network art, I looked at how bots generate images based on their existing ‘knowledge’ of shape and form. These computers are trained on large data sets of images, all classified and tagged so the machine can make sense of them. Google’s Deep Dream, for example, uses a set of ImageNet material with 120 dog categories, explaining why almost everything it hallucinates has some kind of dog, however subtle.

Projects like Deep Dream are more of an artistic side-project than a useful tool, but the tech it’s based on is a bridge towards computer programs being able to make sense of the world around them — whether that’s an image tagger for a search engine, or a robot with nuanced spacial awareness.…
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“I saw women broken by it. I saw girls crying at the end of the night. The only reason I could deal with it is because I had no sense of self worth.”

Past the grand churches and 14th century mansions, the bewildering side-streets of Old Riga are lined with failed bars and shuttered clubs. Every week, bars are bought, sold, and shut down by the police, only to reappear soon after with a new name and logo. This harsh environment, coupled with Riga’s legacy as a sex capital of Europe, leads establishment owners to employ young Latvian women with the job of bringing foreign men in off the street and giving them an expensive fantasy for the night.…
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I started school just as text messaging was making its transition from an obscure, barely-supported feature of mobile phones into a full-blown communication phenomenon. The medium itself was transformational; other than the few characters allowed on a pager screen or emails sent between PCs, digital text communication had not yet seen mainstream consumer adoption. Along with any new medium — especially those developed in tech’s formative years — comes interesting constraints, considerations and debates.

During the transitional era where computers were starting to fill homes all around the world, a collective social anxiety bubbled up to the surface and made its way into magazines, radio shows, and newspaper write-ins.…
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When we think about secret codes, images of military intelligence agents in smokey basements decoding the Enigma probably come to mind. However, for as long as there has been the need to transmit information in secret, there’s been a way to do it — however rudimentary.

In this article, I’ll explore how the ancient methods of encryption have evolved, the security of WhatApp’s end-to-end encryption, and the political anxiety working against progression in the field of encryption.

Ancient cryptography

An early example of cryptography comes from Ancient Rome, and was recorded by Suetonius in his biography of Julius Caesar. Secret messages were encrypted by Caesar using an extremely simple system, but a system that would produce messages that his illiterate enemies would disregard, assuming they were in a foreign language.…
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It’s easy to disregard memes as the scourge of your news feed — which used to be populated with nothing but narcissistic diary entries — but they have a much richer history than that.

Memes are iterative visual jokes developed by a community. Confined to the internet, where the tools to remix and republish are in the hands of every user, they should technically see more innovation as distribution increases. As we’ve seen with the explosion of memes of Facebook, this is no longer the case.